Abstract

Gallium oxide and more particularly matrix is an excellent material for new generation of devices electrically or optically driven as it is known as the widest band gap transparent conductive oxide. In this paper, the optical properties of neodymium dopedgallium oxide films grown by magnetron sputtering have been analyzed. The influence of the Nd ions concentration on the excitation/emission mechanisms of Nd ions and the role of gallium oxide matrix have been investigated. The grain size reduction into gallium oxide films have been observed when concentration of Nd increases. It has been found for all samples that the charge transfer is the main excitation mechanism for Nd ions where defect states play an important role as intermediate states. As a consequence Nd emission efficiency increases with temperature giving rise to most intensive emission at 1087 nm at room temperature.

Received 02 July 2010Accepted 29 July 2010Published online 24 September 2010

Acknowledgments:

The authors want to thank Jacques Perrière from the “Institut des Nanosciences de Paris” for the RBS experiments results and Łukasz Gołacki from Wroclaw University of Technology for writing the software for excitation spectra analysis. This work has been supported by the Polonium project.